ranktracer's blog

Do a search on Amazon for books on advertising, and it's no surprise that Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" shows up first. It's been a smash hit for quite some time now - around ten years and counting.

The premise that a well considered and precise action can induce desirable effects far in excess of the initial "push" is clearly an infectious one in itself.

Ok, so the book is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Neat. But I wanted to see exactly how it stacks up against other top advertising books.

I thought I would compare the online sales of the marketing books written by a random selection of leading marketing gurus to see how they stack up against each other.

Now I should point out that making too direct comparisons on the relative popularity of each book is not quite fair because the books were published at different times, and are different sizes and prices.

Entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses clearly have money to spend when it comes to educating themselves with content and knowledge from leading entrepreneurs like Eric Ries, Crystal Paine and Napoleon Hill.

In my previous article in which I compared the leading titles by marketing gurus, entitled "InfoGraphic: Guy Kawasaki's "Art of the start" outsells other titles by marketing gurus", Guy's book outsold its competitors three to one over a five day period, selling an average of about 60 copies a day. The story is different when it comes to starting and running a business.

Check out this 3d bar graph created with Ranktracer's custom graphing tool (part of our analytics service).

We've compared the sales performance of Life of Pi by Yann Martel with Currency wars by James Rickards. Both books are absolute best sellers on Amazon.

Charles Weinblatt, author of Jacob's courage recently wrote in to tell us:

"I enjoy your service very much, especially as it assists me in tracking sales of my recent novel, Jacob's Courage."

We're pleased to be helping Charles track and analyze the sales of his book. Here's a bit about the title:

Greetings,

I trust that you are all now familiar with the recently introduced social media integration for your sales and analytics accounts. Using these stats as part of blogs or marketing efforts can really give your title's sales a shot in the arm. But, I digress...

New marketing and promotion services

Just as movie stars are sent out into the world to promote their latest films at premieres and gala events, so to are authors required to sell their latest works. It makes sense then that publishers would start eyeing out the best ways for their authors to promote titles.

RankTracer is now integrated with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!

Share Amazon sales rank data socially

The new social media buttons allow you to share individual bits of information with your friends, colleagues and social groups at the click of a button.

When logged into your account you will now notice small sets of three icons grouped below each important piece of statistical information - such as best rank, current rank, daily sales and so on. Click on a button to share that piece of information on the social network of your choice.